


Revisions

by centuries



Category: Alex Benedict - Jack McDevitt
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-21
Updated: 2010-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/centuries/pseuds/centuries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Treat!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Revisions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nic/gifts).



> Treat!

Chase waits for Alex for three nights, listless and aware of the threats he has been facing lately. He has saved her before, she has saved him, but there is still a level of unfamiliarity, not so much a lack of trust but an unwillingness to confer touch and emotion. She likes that about him, that he allows her to galavant around with the boy of the week or even longer, more thorough affairs, that he never intrudes into her privacy as such. But sometimes she wishes he would notice her. He notices her, certainly, and sometimes even looks like her like she was a priceless artifact. She is never sure whether it is a look of money or respect, but most likely, reverence. Maybe that could even be construed as romantic feelings.

Which she wasn’t even sure she really felt for Alex. He was certainly dashing, well-educated, articulate, with a flair for the absurd and an ability to transcend the banality of their often tedious voyages. He was a companion, to be sure, but never really in the sense she really desired out of him.

Desired.

Dammit, she had violated what seemed like a crucial rule--falling for the boss, and not just a boss, but one she spent extended amounts of time in close quarters. Sometimes he would look at her---no, she had to figure out where he was first, and questions of feelings could wait. They could wait an awful long time if she had any say in the matter...

He sends her, his own visage included, a visual of a stone tablet of some sort or another, frantic, late in the evening when she is stumbling through a dynamic drama that requires far more participation than she is currently willing to give. Alex. Not in the flesh, but attractive and a presence, nonetheless. Oh, Alex, what have I done?

She sends him a text message back, not quite willing to leave her diversions yet and he replies expediently with that curt fact he will be present at her place shortly and that she should excuse any fellow who happened to currently be betwixt her sheets.

Oh, Alex.

He shows up nearly a half hour later, tablet in one hand, bottle of wine in the other, with a knowing smirk on his face. “What shenanigans were you up to, Chase?” he asks her, before walking in and seeing the still open remnants of a story board she was working on for a visual, spending too much time critiquing their view of space and open road. “Oh, looks particularly interesting,” he snarked, setting the bottle down with a thud and the tablet down softly. Naturally, she thought. It must be important if he’s here now, but not so important that he hasn’t lost his sense of humor about it.

She finds glasses and pours the wine, and Alex has plopped down on the floor next to where he has set the evening’s accouterments (some disguise or what not) and he is suddenly wearing far less clothes than she is used to thinking of him in.

Hmpf.

He was making ignoring him very difficult, which was a highly difficult endeavor since he was here, talkative and thinking out loud through problems and peculiarities. He was being brash and excitable.

“Alex, what’s the matter?” she asks him, after his third glass of wine.

“I’ve been thinking,” he starts, sitting very near to her and somewhat too euphorically. “Chase, what do you think of me?”

She is unsure how to answer, watching him, vigorous and engaging. Being like himself as usual, just more, with her. So close to her. “How do you mean?” she replies back, hesitant about implications and pathways and gosh, this was Alex. He had nearly completely forgotten the tablet and had been hammering on about the vagaries of today’s market for 3,000 year old objects versus the more immediate past, but he had paused this. And was now asking questions of her, ones she was unsure of how to answer. It was Alex.

“I find you a very interesting and attractive person,” Alex stated, fumbling a bit in selecting the actual words, but finally conveying a bit of a message. “I was wondering, I was thinking maybe, you felt the same about me. I could never been as outlandish, as savvy as you though. When it comes to quick things. Leaps. Like this.”

She looks at him, honest and open in the soft light of the afterglow of several quick films he had showed her earlier, trying to investigate the tablet and what now. “But sometimes you do make the decision to jump, Alex,” she reminds him, heart starting to pound like she is about to make an ill-conceived jump in a ship she’s piloting, but here, the options are not void, nonexistence, but a beginning, a start.

He places his hand, eventually, after minutes, seemingly hours elapse, on her thigh and she leans into him, acquainting herself his smell, and soon, taste. Brash, harsh kisses lacking composure and sensibilities, until she finds herself underneath his weight, losing composure and her rigid ideas of boundaries between herself and Alex.

Though, she isn’t sure she cares about these things, and kisses him back stronger, using her hands, the ones that have found him before, to find different parts of him. Falling into the fabric of her floor, she knocks over his wine glass, drained earlier, and thankfully it doesn’t crack, as she can’t seem to think of anything else but what’s next. She feels him, guides him to her, and is very pleased with the result.

She wakes up the next morning sprawled out in her apartment with Alex reading something or other. He smiles at her, and she wonders for a few flickering moments of fear if he plans on disregarding their encounter, and the things he may have told her in the ecstasy of the moment. “Well Chase, that certainly was a part of the galaxy I had never been to before.”

“Alex,” she looks at him, teasing him with her eyes, “I am now quite disappointed that we never took advantage of our...prolonged proximity before.”

“Indeed, we’ll have to make up for that unfortunate decision.”


End file.
